Introduction (Or Why I Wrote This Book)

I made a promise to God—or the Universe or the Creator or Life itself—that if I made it out of the misery of lack and loneliness that I would use my life to share with others how I did it.

I became a runaway at age 15, yet occasionally I would come back home like a stray cat. So I suppose I was a runaway and a runback: an in-and-outer. Either way, I was a lost soul. I was in a ‘functional depression’ and I went to school, and later to work, nearly everyday, and hid my pain well. That is, until I got to the moment when I really lost everything.

In 2001, I checked myself into the psych ward of the hospital for three weeks. I had just ended a passionate yet violent and tumultuous relationship and was hopeless about life and love, both broke and broken in every way possible, my bills were stacked up in a shoebox, my car had just been repossessed, and I was chronically unfulfilled.

Desperate for happiness, in 2002, I started researching the topic of contagious emotion and catchy energy. I read everything I could about the secrets of happiness, the meaning of life, how to find and keep love, and the pursuit of purpose. Then I began talking to people, hearing the stories of others, and testing the phenomenon that was emerging.

But change for me didn’t happen overnight. I hit a different kind of rock bottom—an empty and passive low—on New Year’s Eve 2006 and wrote my own suicide note. I was beyond wailing out loud; silent tears rolled down my cheeks. “Please help me. I’m so alone,” I whispered to myself, or perhaps to God, or whoever or whatever could stop my grief. My heart ached. It actually ached with fear. Fear I would never be happy. Fear I would always be uncompanionable and alone. Fear I would lose my job and not be able to get by. Fear I’d be stuck in my comatose job another day. Fear I would not make it through the night alone.

I did make it through that night and somehow I fought to pull myself up and then wrote in my journal, “I am going to drill through the rock of this tomb and tell you all how I did it.”

I dedicated myself to self-discovery and to write about my journey, sketching out theories, and sharing the philosophy of what I starting referring to as Viral Energy.

That same year I took a quantum leap and soon changed everything, starting with the very meaning and purpose of my life. Then, I bounced my ideas off of the best doctors of psychology and psychiatry and quantum physics—formally interviewing them and confirming what I knew to be true because I felt it for myself. I have learned so much, the hard and long way.

In this process, I found my purpose and a system of creation energy at work in life; deploying this knowledge has brought me happiness beyond my dreams. Now I am sharing the magic of viral energy with you.